The 50-Day Expert: Oral History and Land Claims Politics in Canada

Robin Jarvis Brownlie

University of Manitoba (Canada)

Canadian courts have debated long and hard about the validity of oral history as evidence in Aboriginal claims cases. Although in recent years they have declared that Aboriginal oral history (and oral traditions) must be given credence and allowed to stand as evidence, the Canadian government has embarked on a counter-campaign to discredit oral history. One of its major weapons currently is an anthropologist named Alexander Von Gernet, who was hired for a 50-day consulting contract to provide an analysis of oral history’s validity. 

Von Gernet produced a report that falsifies, oversimplifies, and omits important cultural and historical context in order to discredit Aboriginal oral traditions. He then became a well-paid expert witness for the federal government who has consistently succeeded in defeating oral history advanced by Aboriginal groups as evidence in court. His inaccurate, misleading, and uninformed portrayals of oral history need to be challenged by historians who have the knowledge and authority to refute his arguments.

About Robin Jarvis Brownlie

Robin Jarvis Brownlie is a scholar who investigates the history of Aboriginal people and colonization, with a particular focus on Aboriginal-government relations, power and resistance, and the use of oral history. She is the author of A Fatherly Eye: Indian Agents, Government Power, and Aboriginal Resistance in Ontario, 1918_1939 (Oxford University Press, 2003), which won the 2005 Joseph Brant Award from the Ontario Historical Society for the best book in the previous three years on multicultural history in Ontario. Dr. Brownlie is an Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.

» Special Session: Language, Authority and Silence: Storytelling and Oral History in Canada

Abstracts/Resumenes de las Ponencias